Tools fit for purpose: Gabii on Fulcrum

by Charles Watkinson on April 2, 2018

You wouldn’t use a fork to eat soup, a saw to cut bread, or a kettle to make stew. But the feeling of having an inappropriate tool for the job is too often the experience of scholars using ebooks. A passion for creating tools that allow specialist users to interact with scholarly publications in a way that is appropriate for their discipline drives the development of University of Michigan Press’s new Fulcrum reading platform, https://www.fulcrum.org, created with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Built on open source software, Fulcrum supports bespoke reading experiences that fit the varying needs of different scholarly communities. Communities like classical archaeologists. Now launched on Fulcrum after a period of beta development on our older DLXS platform, A Mid-Republican House from Gabii is an archaeological site report with a difference. Not only can users access all the associated data from the excavated building, but they can explore it through an interactive 3D model as well as a narrative text. For a limited time Gabii is free to access on Fulcrum. You can explore the publication at: https://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9231782. We’d be grateful for feedback, which you can leave on our feedback tool.

University of Michigan Press publishes distinguished titles in performing arts, political science, American studies, Asian studies, and several other disciplines as well as classical and medieval studies. Look for more Fulcrum editions; unique reading experiences, designed for specialists in these disciplines, in the coming months.